Data-driven project for The Inframation Group

The team at Wide Area has developed a good understanding of our business and the information requirements of our users. They have used this knowledge to develop a series of sites that our customers value greatly.

Project categories

The Inframation Group is part of The Mergermarket Group, a subsidiary of Pearson plc, and is a leading provider of high value business information in the global infrastructure finance market.

The Infra information platform is delivered using the Wide Area content management application together with a bespoke data management application to hold and manage their database of projects, organisations and transactions. Users are managed in Saleforce.com and site access permissions are accessed via the Salesforce.com API.

Inframation has over 500 corporate subscribers including many of the world's leading developers, institutional investors, private equity funds, banks, developers, law firms, advisors and insurers.

The Inframation web properties consist of four sites; InfraNews, InfraAmericas, InfraLatAm and InfraDeals. The regional sites each provide news and research for the infrastructure finance market and InfraDeals provides real-time industry data via a database containing information on 4,000 global infrastructure transactions.

Infra subscribers and trial subscribers are managed using Salesforce.com. The subscriber data is integrated with the website via the Salesforce.com API to manage user access to the sites and maintain email newsletter preferences.

Each entry in the Deals database contains eight data points that relate to the project, the sponsor and the organisation, and the lifecycle of each deal can span several years.

The compiled data enables The Inframation Group to produce a transactional database and an asset owners database, as well as to create targeted reports and regional overviews in the form of a country fact book.

Relevant Deal data is presented throughout the regional sites. Transaction pipeline updates and recently closed transactions are presented within each sector of each region, plus authors have the facility to link specific project data to their article by using the article attribute function in our content management application.

To deliver this project successfully it was essential that we had a complete understanding of the project data and identified the key relationships and metrics that created value for subscribers.

We then had to create a user interface that allowed Inframation Group staff to add and update the data in an intuative and simple way. It is vital that the data does not degrade over time by allowing users to inadvertently create duplicate or incomplete entries.

To find out more about our data integration approach and experience, visit our integration services overview, view more projects or call us to discuss your requirements.